Catching an E-Wave

Surf cams, which started appearing on the Web in the nineteen-nineties, seemed destined to improve productivity among those surfers with lives and without ocean views. No more slogging to the beach at dawn to see what the waves were doing. No more poring through the vagaries of marine forecasts, or the compound vagaries of drawled messages on phone-line surf reports, where one guy’s six feet was another guy’s two feet and the information was often a day old. With surf cams, you could go online and look at the waves and know exactly when to drop everything and dash to the coast.

For New York City surfers, this kind of see-for-yourself is especially useful, since it’s an hour by car or by train from midtown to the nearest waves, which break off the Rockaways or the beach towns just east of Queens. Jim Nason, who lives and surfs in one of those towns—Long Beach—set up a cam in the window of his beachfront apartment in 1998, after a day when, coming home from his job as a computer programmer in Manhattan, he saw that he had been missing excellent waves all afternoon. “That was it,” he recalled recently. “I can get my work done at night if I need to. So the cam was for me, really. But everybody else can check it out, too.”

And they do. Surfer Jim, as he is known online, gets fifty thousand hits a month—even more during the high season for local surfing, which is fall, when the hurricane swells arrive. Every six minutes, his cam takes four photographs, a few seconds apart, of the waves at Long Beach and posts them on his Web site.

A common problem for would-be Jims at other beaches is the resentment that local surfers tend to feel when a cam goes up at their break. The cams increase crowds in the water when the surf is good, creating wave scarcity for the regulars. At various spots on the West Coast, cams have been sabotaged, their operators threatened, their franchises shut down. The vibe on Long Island is mellower than that. “I’ve had guys paddle by me in the water and say, ‘Shut down the cam,’ but that’s about it,” Nason said. It’s difficult to picture anyone getting too confrontational with him. He has, at forty-three, a boyish face, spiky blond hair, and a huge, disarming grin. He also has shoulders about four feet wide.

Nason was happy, on a recent afternoon, to show off his setup. “Just a regular family video cam,” he said, indicating the camera, turned seaward, on a tripod at the window in his living room. “Pinnacle Studio 8 software, comes with a capture card.” He pointed to an old computer case under a table. “There’s about five different drives in there.”

Kids’ toys—bikes, trikes, mini-monster trucks—were stacked against the walls. Nason’s children—Braeden, who’s seven, and Arielle, three—were wrestling in front of the TV. Nason peered at his computer monitor. “Sometimes it will hit some memory error and get stuck,” he said. “People say I do it on purpose when the surf’s good, but it’s not true.” He tapped a couple of keys. “My babysitter reset this at, like, one today,” he said.

Since Nason’s Web site is free—many surf cams require subscriptions—he can be casual about its schedule. “Sometimes, on Saturdays, my kids will get on here to play games, and they’ll take down the cam for a couple of hours. But if the surf’s good I’ll make them get off every forty-five minutes. Give the masses something to look at.”

Nason sees himself as running a modest community service. “I get a lot of e-mail from my site,” he said. “You know, guys from California, moving to New York, write me in a panic: ‘Can I really surf there?’ I write back, ‘Yeah. You can take your board on the L.I.R.R. Here’s what you do.’ ”

In a far corner of the room stood three or four surfboards. But it was the tchotchkes on the windowsill—the candles, the potted cacti—that caught a visitor’s eye. They were all weirdly familiar, and that was because they are what one sees when Nason’s kids, playing, knock the camera askew, causing it to study a blurry spider plant for a few hours. And here were the very beige curtains that Nason’s wife, Paula, has been known to draw against the afternoon sun, leaving the masses to contemplate their weave.

William Finnegan has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1984 and a staff writer since 1987.